VentureBeat and other experts have argued that open-source large language models (LLMs) may have a more powerful impact on generative AI in the enterprise. More powerful, that is, than closed models, like the ones behind OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT, or competitor Anthropic. But that’s been hard to prove when you consider examples of actual deployments. While there’s a ton of experimentation, or proofs of concept, going on with open-source models, relatively few established companies have announced publicly that they have deployed open-source models in real business applications. So we decided to contact the major open source LLM providers, to find examples of actual deployments by enterprise companies. We reached out to Meta and Mistral AI, two of the major providers of open-source providers, and to IBM, Hugging Face, Dell, Databricks, AWS and Microsoft, all of which have agreements to distribute open-source models. From interviews with these companies, it turns out that several initial public examples exist (we found 16 namable cases, see list below), but it’s still very early. Industry observers say the number of cases will pick up strongly later this year. One reason is that open source was slow off the starting block. Meta released the first major open-source model, Llama, in Feb 2023, three months after OpenAI released its ChatGPT model publicly in November 2022. Mistral AI released Mixtral, the top performing open source LLM according to many benchmarks, in December 2023, so just one month ago. So it follows that examples of deployment are only now emerging. Open-source advocates agree there are many more examples of closed-model deployments, but it’s only a matter of time before open-source catches up with the closed-source models. There are some limitations to the open-source models in circulation today. Amjad Masad, CEO of a software tool startup Replit, kicked off a popular Twitter thread about how the feedback loop isn’t working properly because you can’t contribute easily to model development.
Full case study : 16 examples of how enterprises are using open source LLMs.
